Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm going to conclude as well, with a few comments here. I think the rest of the decision-making becomes a political process for the most part, but I do want to highlight a couple of things that are important for our guest to understand and also with regard to where the government goes.
We see that in the House of Commons the government has decided to move closure on Bill C-25 while accepting only one amendment from all the testimony we heard at this committee on, basically, an amendment that was suggested in the original debate that I'd proposed in the House of Commons to at least have a review of that. The rest of the decision-making process will involve political decisions about this.
It's interesting, and I thank the researchers for coming back with regard to a question I had on Shared Services Canada and the bonuses that had been received there and the processes involved. We do have a serious problem here, though, that we have to solve with regard to our census in terms of privacy, to enshrine the independence of Statistics Canada and to protect its integrity at a time when we have formed, with Shared Services, a bureaucratic government agency that's unheralded in Canadian history in terms of its information-gathering component. I don't think we want to undermine the significance of that project that was created, but it is vulnerable to privacy breaches.
I'd point to the privacy breaches that we've all seen in the past. Some of them can be quite dramatic but comical in a sense. We have private industry, companies like Ashley Madison, which has had privacy breaches affecting people. At J.P. Morgan, there was a breach involving banking records. I am a Sony PlayStation player, and we've had a breach there as well. Finally, when shopping on eBay and other sites, privacy has been the most important aspect for consumers, but has often been the least protected. Hence, we have our Privacy Commissioner in Canada to oversee some of these things.
I'll conclude by saying that I think that, obviously, our decision-making and our integrity protection are going to be the most important things for our stats and for setting a model for the world. I found some of the most interesting testimony here today the point that most countries do not outsource their information. One of the things that got me involved in my early career here in Ottawa was the outsourcing of Stats Canada information to Lockheed Martin. There were, obviously privacy issues involved, but also ethical issues. I disagreed with the government's outsourcing of that. In fact, it cost Canadian taxpayers more money to do that, because what we exposed was the fact that it was susceptible to U.S. legislation under the Patriot Act. Moreover, we found out in-house, after the contract was rewarded to Lockheed Martin, that it cost Canadian taxpayers millions more dollars to alter that contract to keep the data here. The so-called outsourcing or privatization of the information to a third party actually cost Canadian taxpayers more.
I want to thank all the witnesses for being here. At the end of the day this is about political decisions and whether or not this government has any intent, whatsoever, to make use of the testimony that we heard and to apply it to legislation in the House of Commons. Apparently, that seems to be void at this particular point in time.